


YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AND I AM AFRAID AND THERE IS NOTHING SEPARATING US FROM THE STARS

by snghw



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Road Trip, Character Study, Developing Friendships, Drinking, Families of Choice, First Meetings, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Kim Hongjoong-centric, Light Angst, M/M, Some Humor, the world is big and we are small and author has only this as her coping mechanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27169085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snghw/pseuds/snghw
Summary: “Hongjoong, that’s Seonghwa.”Hongjoong looks, sees the most beautiful and gentle man in the world a few feet from him, and shakes his head.“Nah,” Hongjoong says. “That’s God.”
Relationships: Choi San/Jung Wooyoung, Jeong Yunho/Song Mingi, Kim Hongjoong/Park Seonghwa
Comments: 36
Kudos: 111





	YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AND I AM AFRAID AND THERE IS NOTHING SEPARATING US FROM THE STARS

_Suppose for a moment that the heart has two heads, that the heart has been chained and dunked in a glass booth filled with river water. The heart is monologing about hesitation and fulfillment while behind the red brocade the heart is drowning. Can the heart escape? Does love even care?_

  
  
  


There is no beauty in running.

There is no magic in the secrecy of filling a bag with underwear and your favorite hoodie and your old-ass barely-working five-year-old laptop, no thrilling mystery in hearing the hum of the engine of your too-tight car and your heart responding with a screamed expletive and a haunted wail for home.

There is no romance in taking the highway and asking the world to catch up.

  
  
  
  


(The world never will. The world doesn’t care.)

  
  
  
  


(The world doesn’t have to care.)

  
  
  
  


You are unimportant and inconsequential at your best, the world tells Hongjoong on a Thursday, and Hongjoong decides Seattle never mattered, never will, at least to him, so he leaves and heads for Tacoma. 

It’s close enough to feel familiar, far enough to feel crisp and new and only-out-of-the-package, so he tries to find an apartment, and tries to call his mother. Then, he reads a novel, has a screaming match with another drunk man in a gay bar, and promptly declares him as his best friend.

This another drunk man in a gay bar is Mingi and he is not always another drunk man in a gay bar, and only accepts the title on the last Friday of every month, or when he feels like Tacoma is too calm and too not-beautiful, which is depressingly often. This another drunk man in a gay bar has a job as a “coffee artist” and finding this out makes Hongjoong drunk-laugh until Mingi begins another screaming match.

They wake up the next day cuddling in bed and Hongjoong doesn’t ask but Mingi answers anyway.

“We didn’t fuck, stop breathing that loud,” he says, and then turns over and snores loud enough for Hongjoong to worry about the neighbours.

He doesn’t find an apartment. Mingi says it’s not unexpected. Hongjoong says he’s tethered and hates it. Mingi says, in the perfect drunk man in a gay bar manner, to run around the country and try to find something good enough to tether himself to and not hate it.

Hongjoong hates that idea.

So the next day he’s gone and Mingi sends him a picture of his newest coffee-art, and then curses Hongjoong for asking whether that’s a cat or a flaccid penis.

(It is a very healthy and erect penis. Go bother Oregon and leave my penis coffee alone. Don’t forget gas. And eating. You absolute birdbrained one-minded fuck.)

  
  
  
  


Oregon is weird, and Hongjoong likes it a bit too little to dismiss that. He still goes to Redmond and gets shitfaced and this time has a less heated meeting with a stoned man in a grocery store. He says something about dropping his wallet under the bean shelves. Hongjoong says something about helping him, and manages to find a hundred dollar bill that doesn't belong to the stoned man in a grocery store. They buy thirty tortilla chips bags and get high in Hongjoong’s car.

The stoned guy’s San and he hates abstract art and sells it to museums for a living. His dad’s an asshole and he hates the world and he smiles like cherries. Hongjoong pats his head and listens to him ramble about a guy that screams a lot and doesn’t know San loves him.

They fucked, apparently.

“We fucked, apparently.”

Hongjoong doesn’t know what that means. San explains.

“Jun said we fucked at some gala thing back in NYC but I don’t remember and he doesn’t ever bring it up. He talks about business partners and restoring old-ass musty paintings and everything else but he hasn’t mentioned it once.”

“Maybe he’s scared.”

“Nah. Fucker doesn’t know fear. He once fought a six foot hunk and won by biting his ankle. I’m, like, seventy-four percent convinced he’s a malevolent fairy or some shit.”

Hongjoong listens and answers whenever he remembers he’s more than a random bystander watching a dramatic monologue. He smokes another joint, gives San half the bags and then falls asleep with the shift stick against his ribs. San whines in his sleep about food and Hongjoong has to kick him awake.

“Oh! Oh! Vegas is so fucking fun, Joongie. Go to Vegas. Bet the house on the ponies,” is San’s greeting three weeks later.

“I’m pretty sure betting and gambling are different.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re a smartass and my best friend.”

“We met three weeks ago.”

“I never met the guys from Backstreet Boys and I don’t know their names but I’m halfway in love with every one of them.”

Hongjoong heads to Vegas next.

  
  
  
  


He gets drunk in a casino he doesn’t care for the name of, answers Mingi and San’s texts, and manages to lose the car. Not gambling. Just. Physically.

The cops say someone took it, Hongjoong cries a bit and screams at San for his unnecessarily accurate clairvoyant powers, and then calls Mingi to pick him up.

He does.

They end up in a Denny’s at ten in the morning and Hongjoong cries into his milkshake. Mingi tells him he’s got a friend in Chicago that wouldn’t mind housing Hongjoong for a bit, and offers to pay for the flight. Hongjoong only takes the idea and threatens to steal the copyrights to it. Mingi hugs him and they drink at a local gay bar. San calls, and he and Mingi talk about Hongjoong’s inability to regard self-preservation as more than a nuisance, and Mingi tells him to just confess to the guy San fucked (apparently). Hongjoong agrees, downs the tequila, and falls face-first into a bush on their way to the hotel.

  
  
  
  


Yeosang picks him up from the airport. He’s beautiful and kind and harsh and Hongjoong is a little bit in love.

“There’s a spare room,” Yeosang says in a voice too deep and too clear for Hongjoong’s good, “and there’s, like, this weird pool-like thing in the backyard. It’s half a hot tub. I think.”

It’s a pool with heating. Close enough.

“That’s Jongho,” Yeosang says, looking at the boy doing laps inside the pool in a butterfly stroke and too-large swimming trunks. “Annoying little brother. Best friend. Terribly constipated in every area of life except sports and singing.”

In the kitchen, there’s another guy, and he’s too tall and reminds Hongjoong of Mingi and his exact opposite in the same shell, and he almost cumbusts when he feels the man pull him against his chest.

“I’m Yunho!” Oh, loud. “I’m happy to meet you and I can’t wait to finally get Yeosang out of the house for once.”

“Yunho,” Yeosang says later, on a walk at the shore. “He’s the loudest and most sunny older brother in the world.”

“He’s adorable,” Hongjoong says. “Long puppy.”

Yeosang laughs so much he falls on his side and Hongjoong tries to catch him.

(It’s terribly ineffective. He falls and scrapes his knee and laughs all night about it, even when Yunho disinfects it and pouts about being careful.)

  
  
  
  


Seonghwa comes too early for Hongjoong to be fully aware of. He makes his coffee, downs it, makes another, and screams when a voice yells about an apparent intruder.

“That’s Hongjoong,” Jongho says, passing by Seonghwa in the living room. “Hongjoong, that’s Seonghwa.”

Hongjoong looks, sees the most beautiful and gentle man in the world a few feet from him, and shakes his head.

“Nah,” Hongjoong says, because he is asleep and that’s not Seonghwa. “That’s God.”

Yeosang laughs from somewhere in the downstairs bathroom.

  
  
  
  


“Why did you leave Seattle?”

“Bored. Sad. Hate the world, angry about global warming and apathy. Forgot my favorite novel, though, and I’m pretty sure that’s affecting me in psychological ways I will never be able to understand, nor comprehend.”

Seonghwa blinks, looks up, and bursts into loud, uncontained laughter. He looks like someone’s pinching his elbow when he smiles. Hongjoong is deeply enamoured. Hongjoong is deeply fucked. Hongjoong is deeply yearning to make Seonghwa laugh for the rest of his unimportant and inconsequential life.

Later, Seonghwa asks about the trip, why he came to Yeosang’s.

“Lost the car in a Casino incident,” he says, trying his best.

“Someone nicked it while he was losing at blackjack and confusing the Ace with the Joker in a somehow parallel game of Poker.”

“Fuck off, Yeo.”

  
  
  
  


“I could,” Seonghwa says, and stops, and lets the Universe age too many seconds before continuing. “I could use a pause.”

“A pause?”

“Yeah. I’m— kinda running on fumes, to be honest. So. A pause.”

“You got a car?”

“Yeah.”

“You got the crippling insecurity of letting anyone else drive it?”

“No.”

“Then let’s go. I always wanted to see Long Island. Maybe Montauk. Definitely North Haven.”

“Now?”

“Why not?”

  
  
  
  


Seonghwa says something about his mother, something about high school, something about virginity and hating the world and falling in love with it on midsummer nights. Seonghwa says something about the stars, about how they make him feel immense rather than undiscovered, about how Hongjoong reminds him of Antares. Hongjoong laughs. He’s a Scorpio. Seonghwa’s an Aries. Hongjoong understands almost nothing about the signs or the stars, but he understands the way Seonghwa hesitates but looks.

He takes Seonghwa’s hand, runs around the beach, throws water in his face.

  
  
  
  


Untethered—

  
  
  
  


(Wooyoung said he loves me, and somehow I’m still jealous of you.)

(Yo, who’s the pain-smile dude? He’s literally the best looking dude ever. I’m gonna’ fight your ass.)

(Tell Hwa to stop with the random exclamation marks and love confessions. I am tired and still mad you didn’t take me with you.)

  
  
  
  


Mingi opens the door, takes a look at Hongjoong, at Seonghwa, at their hands intertwined, and shuts it.

“You _did not,_ ” Mingi yells through the door, “fucking _elope_ with _the prettiest man on Earth._ You did not just disrespect me like that.”

“It’s not my fault Yunho has standards and you’re a quivering fool unable to face his feelings!” Hongjoong yells back.

Mingi opens the door, has another screaming match with Hongjoong, and then calls Seonghwa his father for the next three days they’re in town.

**Author's Note:**

> i have no idea what i just wrote, i only know theres a lot i feel about the world and ateez are my favorite boys and id do anything for them
> 
> if you have critique or praise or just want to scream into my soul, i appreciate comments more than anything in the world and even a random ass exclamation sign makes me buzz for a month
> 
> if you have questions or wanna talk to me for the purpose of hongjoong: [twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/snghwatz) & [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.qa/snghw). 


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